With the advent of the computer age, computer and software users have grown accustomed to user-friendly software applications that help them write, calculate, organize, prepare presentations, send and receive electronic mail, make music, and the like. For example, modern electronic word processing applications allow users to prepare a variety of useful documents. Modern spreadsheet applications allow users to enter, manipulate, and organize data. Modern electronic slide presentation applications allow users to create a variety of slide presentations containing text, pictures, data or other useful objects. Modern database applications allow users to store, organize and exchange large amounts of data.
In many electronic documents, certain objects or areas are provided for which document authors and/or managers desire access control. For example, all pages of an electronic document, for example, a word processing document, a spreadsheet document, a slide presentation document, and the like, may be labeled with a legal disclaimer by the document author, and the document author and/or manager may desire that no subsequent user be allowed to access and alter or otherwise edit the legal disclaimer. Similarly, an object in a document, for example, a picture object, a text object, a data table object, and the like, may contain information such as a company logo, document retention or tracking data, or sensitive company or institution data that should not be accessed and/or changed by subsequent users of the electronic document.
In many organizations, control of such areas or objects in electronic documents is managed through education of users as to the importance of not altering certain areas or objects in organization documents. In some cases, document templates are utilized in a given organization, and all users are educated as to those areas or objects in a given template that should not be altered. In other situations, some organizations utilize employees for manually auditing organization documents from time-to-time to ensure that certain areas or objects of the organization's electronic documents are not altered. Such methods are often not effective because users of the documents may accidentally or even intentionally alter controlled document areas or objects despite the wishes of the document authors and/or managers.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.